If you did not catch the great piece in the NY Times about dyslexia, do so. It's basically about the benefits of having dyslexia and the gift that it really is.

Last month, at the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Conference on Dyslexia and Talent, I watched several neurobiologists present evidence that the dyslexic brain, which processes information in a unique way, may impart particular strengths. Studies using cognitive testing and functional M.R.I.’s have demonstrated exceptional three-dimensional and spatial reasoning among dyslexic individuals, which may account for the many successful dyslexic engineers. Similar studies have shown increased creativity and big-picture thinking (or “gist-detection”) in dyslexics, which correlates with the surprising number of dyslexic entrepreneurs, novelists and filmmakers.

With 5% of the population being dyslexic and most not being diagnosed, we are fortunate when someone breaks the silence and talks about it. The video below is a Ted talk and one of the best I have see. What am amazing girl.

The Wall street Journal recently had a great article on Dyslexia, featuring many successful ones that wee able to "overcome" it through creativity and hard work.

According to the article:

Actor Henry Winkler was told he was stupid. A teacher labeled Dan Malloy, the future governor of Connecticut, "mentally retarded." Delos Cosgrove recalls "hanging on by my fingernails" in high school and college before becoming a thoracic surgeon and the Cleveland Clinic's chief executive officer.

Each has dyslexia, a condition that makes reading difficult but has little to do with intelligence. Mounting evidence shows that many people with dyslexia are highly creative, out-of-the-box thinkers, and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that their brains really do think differently.

For the complete article, a version of this article appeared April 2, 2013, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Dyslexia Workarounds: Creativity Without a Lot of Reading.

Great article from below on NewsMax Health.Steven Spielberg says movies saved him from the stress and shame of dyslexia. (TE call home?) Henry Winkler (The Fonz) became master of the ad lib, since he couldn't make sense of the "Happy Days" scripts. Toby Cosgrove became a cardiac surgeon and is now CEO of Dr. Mike's Cleveland Clinic. These are just three of the more than 50 million North Americans who have dyslexia. But what exactly is dyslexia? Simply put, it's the inability to connect letters with sounds and put those sounds in the right order. Reading depends on accurate, consistent sound processing and ordering - even if, while you're reading, those sounds are heard only inside your brain! This new understanding of the sound-reading connection means some kids can ease their reading woes with auditory therapy. The therapy involves listening to sounds, syllables, words, and sentences (no reading), then trying to identify differences in pitch and accurately ID the meaning of a word or phrase by choosing a picture that represents it. This can rewire the brain so that sound is processed more accurately, and, yep, that improves reading. Early indications of dyslexia include: difficulty repeating a list of numbers or words, an inability to rhyme words or to enjoy hearing rhymes, confusing up/down and over/under, or misstating colors' names (saying "blue" for "green").

Researchers at Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory investigated the underlying biological causes of dyslexia and found that a child’s reading ability is directly related to how efficiently the brain encodes sound. The study's results, published in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that personal listening devices can improve reading ability by limiting the sounds that the brain encodes.

Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs a person’s ability to either read or comprehend the written word. According to Nina Kraus, the study’s co-author and a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University’s School of Communication, reading ability is often associated with auditory skills, including auditory memory and attention as well as rhyming ability.

The National Center for Learning Disabilities estimates that 15-20 percent of school-aged children suffer from some language-based learning disability. The most common is dyslexia.

New research suggests that playing video games can help with with dyslexia. I know that sounds strange, but in may be true.

Playing action video games can boost reading skills in dyslexic children, a new study has found. In fact, 12 hours of video game play did more for reading skills than is normally achieved with a year of spontaneous reading development or demanding traditional reading treatments, according to the study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. - See more at: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/video-games-may-boost-reading-skills-in-dyslexic-kids-study/1082163#sthash.4zq3rWD3.dpuf

This has proved to be a controversial study, but it is likely not far off where technology will take a more active role in helping those with dyslexia. More to come.

It does seem as though we are getting closer and closer to determining what causes dyslexia. But what happens if we actually find a solution. There is no doubt that having dyslexia can be challenging - but there is also no doubt that many of the worlds best thinkers are and have been dyslexic. Think of a world with no Steven Spielberg or no Albert Einstein. Would the world be better off? I think not.

People have often wondered what causes dyslexia. Now, researches at Northwestern may have determined. According to lead author of the study Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication at Northwestern, the biological underpinnings all revolve around the brain and a seemingly unrelated action – a person’s hearing ability.

According to Time magazine "The researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience, recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 kids aged six to 13 as they heard speech sounds. The brains of the more adept readers encoded the sounds, or processed the speech into brain waves, in a more consistent way than those who struggled to read. The latter group tended to show more erratic and fluctuating patterns, which understandably meant that their brains were less able to consistently connect sounds with words. That in turn could interfere with their ability to read, since reading in part involves a virtual hearing of printed language. “Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” study author Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and communication at Northwestern University said in a statement."Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/researchers-find-a-biological-marker-for-dyslexia-in-kids/#ixzz2Lb0S1L7k